Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven Sigley
Team 100 used to be quite the powerhouse and seem to be in a small slump. They appear to have worked at bouncing back at SVR though and I can't wait to see what they do next year.  |
Here's what happened to us:
In 2010, we had a ton of really experienced seniors, which greatly contributed to our success that year. However, they all graduated, and we had 0 seniors the next year as part of the core technical team. So, in 2011, it was a few juniors, a few sophomores, and one or two freshmen, and some of those juniors were actually first year FIRSTers. Then in 2012, we only had 2 technical seniors with more than one year behind them, and only one started as a freshman. Essentially, we had no juniors in 2010 to replace our graduating seniors, so much of the knowledge of those graduates was lost. We were left with a 1-2 year experience gap.
Because of our team dynamic, a lack of student experience generally results in subpar robots. Our mentors make almost no robot related decisions and instead give us their opinions, so ultimately, decisions are left to the students. This has its pros and cons, as I've described, but it seems to me that our students graduate with more experience than they may get on other teams.
This year, we had solid experience, but for reasons I will not discuss publicly, our first robot turned out... poorly. During eliminations and closing ceremonies of Sacramento, two other lead mechanical people, our captain, and I decided to spend our spring break redoing the robot. We spent one day on conceptual design, two days on CAD, one day on water jetting at TechShop, two on manufacturing, and one on testing. Given our performance at SVR, I'm happy with our comeback. I'm conflicted about staying up until 6am CADing so we could use the water jet at 9am though...
Right now, the robot has some flaws, but they're mainly either left over from the old robot (AKA the weird and poorly driving drivetrain). Hopefully that'll get redone over the summer, but regardless, this was a good finish to the year (and my last season).
701 seems to be a rising power too. Can't wait to see you next year!